The recovery of large, medium and small End Of Life tyres

The collection of small, medium and large ELTs of Ecopneus in 2021

The management of the collection of small, medium and large ELTs  

About 350,000 tonnes of tyres reach their end of life in Italy every year. They derive from the replacement of tyres of the circulating vehicles: the data highlight that about 30 million automobile tyres are placed on the spare parts market every year; moreover, another 2 million tyres for trucks, 3 million tyres of 2-wheeled vehicles, and over 300,000 tyres for the industrial and agricultural vehicles.  

The latter represent a small quota compared to what is placed on the overall market: about 0.9%. However, by looking at the percentage in weight compared to the total, the quota goes up to over 4%. This is due to the large dimensions and subsequent weight of this typology of End-of-Life Tyres.

As it is easy to imagine, the characteristics of this typology of tyres require a high level of specialisation and technical equipment from the part of the companies that deal with tyre collection, transfer, and transport to treatment centres. They also require important management efforts to guarantee that all these End-of-Life tyres are correctly recovered all over Italy.

Finally, even the areas where large the End-of-Life Tyres are generated (farms, quarries, industrial sites) are usually located outside large urban centres or in places which cannot be easily reached. This makes their collection even more expensive and complex.  

Also for these reasons, the effort of Ecopneus is even more important, as it guarantees ELT collection all over the national territory, small islands included, and their recovery and recycling from the part of the treatment companies part of the  Ecopneus chain.

Number of ELTs collected during every intervention

Another useful indicator of the capillarity of the Ecopneus collection on the territory is the number of “pieces” collected during every ELT intervention carried out at spare parts operators’. The lower the number of ELTs per single collection, the more capillary the collection has been and has involved small spare parts centres located in remote places. Indeed, ELT collection carried out at small generation points (tyre dealers, service stations, mechanics etc.) is more expensive as it is less efficient compared to the interventions carried out at large tyre replacement centres (where it is possible to collect many more ELTs with a single collection). If we take into consideration “manual” interventions, that is, carried out without the help of dedicated containers, and that represent 94% of the overall collection of Ecopneus, we notice that in 58% of the collections carried out by Ecopneus in 2019 less that 200 “pieces” have been collected.  This quota goes up to 75% if we consider also the collection activities with less than 300 pieces.

The collection is aligned with the expectations also in 2021.

Number of ELTs collected during every intervention in 2020 and 2021

Relationship between withdrawal requests received and requests processed

The map at the bottom of the page contains the data referring to the relationship between the ELT withdrawal requests entered into Ecopneus’ computer system by the spare parts operators (tyre dealers, service stations, garages) and the withdrawal requests processed by Ecopneus through its partner companies. Any deviations between the two values may be due to the way in which the ELT withdrawal requests are handled, as the withdrawal requests received may in some cases be handled in the following month. Visit also our page on the monthly trend of ELT collection to find out the data of Ecopneus’ ELT collection of ELTs month by month, for each Italian Region.

Relationship between withdrawal requests received and requests processed

The map at the bottom of the page contains the data referring to the relationship between the ELT withdrawal requests entered into Ecopneus’ computer system by the spare parts operators (tyre dealers, service stations, garages) and the withdrawal requests processed by Ecopneus through its partner companies. Any deviations between the two values may be due to the way in which the ELT withdrawal requests are handled, as the withdrawal requests received may in some cases be handled in the following month. Visit also our page on the monthly trend of ELT collection to find out the data of Ecopneus’ ELT collection of ELTs month by month, for each Italian Region.

Relationship between the collection requests entered into the Ecopneus IT system and processed collection requests

Data updated as of 31st March 2021